Help the Environment. Turn Off Paper Statements

While using online banking recently, I read “Help the Environment. Turn off paper statements,” Well that’s a no-brainer. Why not!

Sounds like a large company that is concerned about the environment. While they probably are, we all suspect that profit-loss is the larger concern in there altruism.

If the bank sends a paper statement to their 3.5 million retail customers it will take roughly 200+ trees to produce that paper. Someone has calculated there are nearly 247 billion trees of a diameter of more than one inch in the United States.[1] The difference on the environment is microscopic.

The point is, they are saying something that seems valid at face value. But it’s more complicated than that. It is debatable at the very least, and may not even be true.

Another common refrain in the US is the call to buy now and save! If you don’t buy it now, you won’t save. It’s never about spending, it’s always about saving. So we spend more than we want to at the moment, because we know we’re saving.

On the day of the crucifixion the Roman Governor asked Jesus, “What is truth?”[2]

Someone I know who is facing a legal proceeding was told privately by his lawyer, “The truth doesn’t matter in this issue. It’s really not about the truth.”

Really? No law firm would ever advertize that.

Every culture I’ve been in has blind spots. Things they believe that are not true.

Here in the United States many people more intelligent than I believe the oceans are here as the result of meteor hits. (Picture)

We believe that individual rights trump broad society-wide freedoms.

We believe we’re smarter than past generations.

Not everything we believe is true.

The Roman Governor's question had been triggered by something Jesus said. "… the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”[3]

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[1] http://www.savatree.com/tree-facts.html, “interesting Facts About Trees”

[2] John 18:38

[3] John 18:37

The Sun is Really Bright Today!

“There was the true light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man.” John 1:9

Here the Gospel writer John calls Jesus Christ “the true light.” That would be the real deal. The true light. The light that makes the other lights seem minor or insignificant.

On a sidewalk in Annville, PA recently,  I thought the sun is the true light of this physical world. It is the one light we absolutely could not do without. The Earth needs to bathe in its light 24/7.

Many lights, - tail lights, a flashlight, a neon sign, help us in various ways. They offer us warnings, convey information, guide us, and make life convenient. We can and often do live without some of these. They are relatively minor lights that are made possible by the true light of the sun. It is the source.

So John calls Jesus “the true light.” The true light came into the world. The Light of God. The moral light. The example. The pattern. The true Illuminator.

 That light “enlightens every man.” He makes it possible for us to see. Just as the sun enables vision, so His inner light enables us to see reality. By it we can discern what is right. Every man and woman has received this light, to some degree. That’s what John says.

Every culture has some norms of what is acceptable and what is not. There are some norms of decency acceptable in every nation or tribe. They don’t all agree, but they do exist. C.S. Lewis wrote, “The moralities accepted among men may differ, though not, at bottom, so widely as is often claimed…”[1] There is not an inhabited place on earth that does not have some acceptable standard or some concept of what is good and what is not good. This can be referred to as moral “light.” This is the light that Jesus, “the true light” has enlightened us with.

Just as the sun has enlightened all of us, so the true light, Jesus, has shined in our hearts and we have some vision. He is the one moral light we cannot do without.

John goes on to say, “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name…” (John 1:12) Receive the full light of Jesus today. Believe in Him! The Sun is really bright today!

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[1] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain,(New York: MacMillan Publishing Co, 1962)  21-22

The Shout of the Sunrise (Conclusion)

“And they who dwell in the ends of the earth stand in awe of Thy signs; Thou dost make the dawn and the sunset shout for joy.”[1]

C.S. Lewis wrote during the World War II era, “There is no reason why our reaction to a beautiful landscape should not be the response, however humanly blurred and partial, to a something that is really there.”[2] In the first part of this article, I presented the debate that exists between the humanist with his evolutionary presuppositions and the Christian theist with his biblical perspective of creation. I conclude this article with two arguments in support of the latter point of view.

Proof 1: The sense of beauty and awe



It is a fact that nature’s spectacles such as a sunrise attract people all over the world. Today, thousands of photographs will be taken of the dawns and sunsets around the world. Travellers will upload photos of the rising sun onto various web sites. We gaze at the bright, shining beauty of the dawn. We ponder the precision that brings about the sunrise at the exactly predicted moment. As Lewis observed, we have a “reaction” to what we see.

We call this reaction an aesthetic sense. We’re attracted to the beautiful, the inspiring. Even scientists, in their quest to discover what makes the universe tick, employ language that often sounds strangely theological. Two time Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan is one of the few human beings to have viewed the earth from the moon. Being interviewed in a documentary of the Apollo missions Cernan recalled, “I felt I was literally standing on a plateau out there in space, a plateau that science and technology had allowed me to get to. Now what I was seeing, even more importantly what I was feeling at that point in time, science and technology had no answers for. Literally no answers. Because there I was, and (looking up) there you are… there you are, the earth, dynamic, overwhelming, and I felt that there was just too much purpose, too much logic, it was just too beautiful to have happened by accident. There has to be someone bigger than you and bigger than me, and I mean this in a spiritual sense, I’m not religious, but there has to be a Creator of the universe who stands above the religions that we create to govern our lives.”[3]

It is a reality that man has a sense of beauty and amazement. Why? If we are random products of nature with no purpose for being here beyond survival of the species as evolution states, then why does the Divine “shout for joy” attract us? Why do we feel inspired to paint the scene, photograph it, and plan our honeymoon to see it, or memorialize it in a song? From a strictly evolutionary basis, why would humans have this sense of appreciating beauty that leads us to higher, nobler thinking?

People’s attraction to majestic, powerful, or beautiful sights is not only pleasing to our senses. It also often causes us to consider transcendent things, as was the case with Cernan. Philip Yancey writes, “Despite the awesome emptiness of our universe, despite the pain that haunts it, something lingers, like a scent of old perfume, from that moment of beginnings in Genesis 1. I too have sensed it. The first time I rounded a bend and saw Yosemite Valley spread out before me, its angel-hair waterfalls spilling over the snow glazed granite. On a small peninsula of Ontario where five million migrating monarch butterflies stop to rest, their papery wings adorning every tree with shimmering, translucent orange… In the beginning, the very beginning, there was … Only joy.”[4]

Man’s aesthetic capacity is an observable fact. This is a universal phenomenon. People all over the world watch, admire, and wonder. When we look at a vast sunrise panorama, a waterfall or the massive rolling waves, we feel small and our thoughts are drawn upward.

Proof 2: Religions everywhere!

That inner attraction and curiosity at the natural world contributes to a second proof that the creation announces a Designer. The universal presence of religion supports the biblical claim regarding nature’s origin. It is partly this fearfulness of nature that explains the worldwide presence of religions. In every culture there is a belief in something beyond what is seen. Often the form of the world’s religions has been the worship of nature. This is human religion in its most primitive form. The ancient Egyptians worshiped the sun and the Norse, among other things, venerated thunder. Other civilizations worshipped the moon, the sea, or other observable phenomena. Why? Partly at least because of the admiration they inspire. Through observing the dawn, the moon, the lightening, through hearing the thunder, men were drawn to look beyond themselves and worship. Bible translator J. B. Philips reasoned, “Arguing… from what we know to what we don’t know, we may fairly say that as food is the answer to hunger, water the answer to thirst, and a mate to sexual desire, this universal hunger for Truth is unlikely to be without its answer and fulfillment...”[5]

Many mistakenly say that nature itself is god. Because this tendency to worship nature was so strong, in the pre-Christian era, God strictly forbade Israel from this practice. He wanted no confusion between creation and Creator. Some equate the two, but that’s not the scope of this article. The Christian view is the uniqueness and separateness of the Creator and the created.

Many would have us believe religion exists because of what our parents and their parents, and their parents ad infinitum have taught us. It is social conditioning. From an evolutionary point of view, how would this contribute to the survival of our species? Is it not reasonable to say that religion is in every place and culture down through history at least in part because nature “shouts for joy” that ‘something big’ is up? For me, this is a self-evident truth.

The Mercy of God

The Apostle Paul declares that the Lord is not hiding. He writes, “…because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.”[6] The Creator has made Himself evident through His handiwork. In the Old Testament for a human to see God’s actual being was fatal. Maybe His indirect revealing of Himself through the exquisiteness and greatness of nature is done in mercy? Is it possible that God simply cannot wait to show Himself to us? He wants to share his glory with us but not destroy us in the process. First light attracts us because of its color it doesn’t kill us! To fix your eyes on the divine inventions draws us to worship; it does not end our lives.

Final Word

Have you ever stared at the blurring wings of a hummingbird? Or considered the tiny foot and toes of a newborn? Looked up at the enormity of the towering clouds? Have you ever commented on the color of the sea? The entire universe is an evidence of God’s creative work that communicates to our senses that someone is its Architect. This “general” revelation from God, as theologians call it, is obvious to men. To deny this is a denial of us in some sense. We appreciate nature through an inner artistic-like capacity. Due in part to this detection of God’s fingerprints in nature, man is religious everywhere. The Lord has surrounded us with the works of His hands and they shout with joy to us. Let us not lightly stand by as scoffers declare there is no substantiation for God in the natural world. The proof is all around us! Just get up early tomorrow morning and see!

[1] Psalm 65:8 (NASB)
[2] C.S. Lewis, “Christian Reflections,” (William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd, Glasgow, 1967) p 96-97
[3] “In the Shadow of the Moon,” 2007, a film by Ron Howard
[4] Philip Yancey, “Disappointment With God,” (Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, 1988) p. 59
[5] J.B. Philips, “Your God is Too Small (Touchstone Books, New York, 2004 (from 1952 original)), p. 71
[6] Romans 1:19-20 (NASB)